Breast Cancer Ultrasound Images' Sequence Exploration Using BI-RADS Features' Extraction: Towards an Advanced Clinical Aided Tool for Precise Lesion Characterization.

This research concerned a clinical need for precise breast cancer lesion characterization imaged by ultrasound sequences. Using therefore BI-RADS features that would be carefully extracted, the purpose of this study could be mainly to prove and to demonstrate the possibility of surveying precisely the changing characteristics of a breast cancer lesion within a considered ultrasound images' sequence. This was in fact a clinical need of a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system permitting flexible and convivial clinical analysis of multi-slices' ultrasound breast cancer lesion with greater precision. The obtained results of our images' sequence breast cancer ultrasound analysis had shown the lesion form changing depending on the treated slice, as well as the values' differences for the morphological and the textural features. This would allow extracting more information about breast cancer lesions helping then radiologist to converge more rapidly and with a certain reinforced precision to the accurate clinical action to conduct. Such results would be reassembled and rearranged for constituting one computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system that could be provided for clinical explorations permitting on the other hand to avoid possible confusion between benign and malignant masses.

3D multimodal MRI brain glioma tumor and edema segmentation: a graph cut distribution matching approach.

This study investigates a fast distribution-matching, data-driven algorithm for 3D multimodal MRI brain glioma tumor and edema segmentation in different modalities. We learn non-parametric model distributions which characterize the normal regions in the current data. Then, we state our segmentation problems as the optimization of several cost functions of the same form, each containing two terms: (i) a distribution matching prior, which evaluates a global similarity between distributions, and (ii) a smoothness prior to avoid the occurrence of small, isolated regions in the solution. Obtained following recent bound-relaxation results, the optima of the cost functions yield the complement of the tumor region or edema region in nearly real-time. Based on global rather than pixel wise information, the proposed algorithm does not require an external learning from a large, manually-segmented training set, as is the case of the existing methods. Therefore, the ensuing results are independent of the choice of a training set. Quantitative evaluations over the publicly available training and testing data set from the MICCAI multimodal brain tumor segmentation challenge (BraTS 2012) demonstrated that our algorithm yields a highly competitive performance for complete edema and tumor segmentation, among nine existing competing methods, with an interesting computing execution time (less than 0.5s per image).

Evidence of myocardial ischaemia in severe scorpion envenomation. Myocardial perfusion scintigraphy study.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the myocardial perfusion by thallium-201 scintigraphy for patients with evidence of myocardial damage after scorpion envenomation. DESIGN: Prospective study over 1-year period. SETTING: Medical intensive care unit of a university hospital (Sfax, Tunisia). PATIENTS: We have prospectively included six patients admitted for scorpion envenomation over a period of 1 year in the 22-bed intensive care unit (ICU) of our university hospital. The evidence of myocardial damage was confirmed by electrocardiography and echocardiography in all patients. Myocardial perfusion scintigraphy ((201)Tl scintigraphy) coupled with radionuclide ventriculography ((99m)Tc) was performed for all patients, occurring 32 h on average (range 12-72 h) after the sting. RESULTS: Radionuclide ventriculography was abnormal in all cases; the abnormalities observed were similar to those observed by echocardiography. Moreover (201)Tl scintigraphy showed evidence of myocardial hypoperfusion in all cases. The myocardial hypoperfusion grade and localisation were more marked in the abnormal localisation shown by echocardiography and electrocardiography, compared to the normal wall. Repeated studies, obtained only in two patients within 6 and 15 days, respectively, showed considerable, but not complete, improvement of wall motion and myocardial perfusion. Segments with improved perfusion showed greatly improved regional wall motion. CONCLUSION: This study confirms the evidence of myocardial hypoperfusion after severe scorpion envenomation.